


Jubilee

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Harsh Realm
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:25:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Florence remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jubilee

Florence remembers the day the bomb went off.

She was nineteen years old and lithe; she moved like a dancer though dancing was forbidden and so she never had a chance to make use of her own grace, not then. The Sisters lived in a cluster of low houses far away from any town, from any other house. They rose early and prayed and worked the fields, and they spun cloth and dipped the wax for candles, and sitting in the late morning light Florence's fingers were stained with white. Her clothes were white. The sky out the window was white, and suddenly there was a brighter glow, only a second, and it hurt her eyes. Then the sky was white again.

The next day, the people began to come in their cars, passing along the roads in lines that stretched to the horizon. Florence looked down the hill to the road that ran like a line in the distance and watched the sun gleam off the metal roofs. Then a car turned and started up the gravel that led to the houses. Other Sisters saw it and it threw them into disarray. They lived apart. They always had. People knew they were there but no one ever spoke to them, and so no one knew that they didn't speak. No one knew what they could do. God had put His power into their hands but God had commanded them to go out and be separate and so they kept their gift close like a secret, like something dangerous, and when the first cars came they were turned away.

But on the fourth day of the exodus the burned people began to come, moaning with pain, some carried by their families, laid at the Sisters' doorstep. The Sisters gathered in the doorway to stare at the people, chased away by the Mother, but in the end they always returned, the curiosity too strong. They had never seen pain or death, expect the pain of the cows as they gave birth to their calves, and the deaths of the chickens as the knife separated head from body.

Florence stood behind the group, and when she caught a glimpse of raw, blistered flesh, she turned and closed her eyes as if denying the fact of it. But inside her, a small, still voice began to speak. She'd been taught to pay heed to that voice, the Vox Domini, the Voice of God set within them because their own voices had been taken away. The Vox Domini was the guide of one's path, the maker of the way, and to set it aside as though it were not there was blasphemy.

The voice spoke. Florence turned, pushed her way through the clot of her Sisters and stepped out onto the flagstones in front of the house. Three people, a man and a woman and a little child, and the man had burns on his face but they were nothing to the child's, the skin churned and a sick, angry, glistening red all down his face and arm. He turned and shivered, whimpering softly out of the intact half of his mouth. He didn't seem to be awake.

The Vox Domini spoke again. Florence knelt and touched the child's burned flesh, and the gift unfolded itself like a flower through her fingers. When it was over she fell back onto the stones. No one stepped forward to catch her.  


* * *

  
Florence remembers the day the bomb went off. That was years ago and a lot has happened since then. She ducks the punch swung at her and swings back with one of her own, but Mike catches her wrist, turns and kicks her legs out from under her. She goes down with a heavy exhale and he steps on her chest, his face thrown into shadow by the sun behind him.

"You keep leaving yourself open. Don't do that." He reaches down a hand and she takes it, glaring up at him. She'd wanted to learn to fight. She hadn't expected him to enjoy torturing her quite this much.

Though, maybe she should have.

"Again," he says, stepping back and shaking his shoulders loose. "Try to take me."

Florence steps forward with her dancer's grace, and Mike blocks the first blow she tries but she feels the air part around her and she lands the next one, glancing but close to on target. She turns on the balls of her feet, trying to hook her arm around his neck but he's not there, at her side and coming at her with an elbow to her throat. She spins again, and this time she feels it, not the Manus Domini or the Vox Domini but something even older, more primal, an underbrain that requires no thought or instruction, a part of her that has always known how to do this. She takes his arm and flips him easily onto his back, and he grunts hard as he hits the dirt. Her boot settles on his chest. Once the flush of victory is gone she expects him to be angry with her, but he's looking up at her, and when he slaps the side of her leg he's grinning.  


* * *

  
It was the beginning of her disobedience. She opened her eyes to see the Mother shaking her head in disapproval, the candlelight casting the lines of her face into harsh, abyssal shadows. Florence sat up and looked at her hand. She had used her gift for an Outsider. It was not unheard of, but she had not waited for permission and she had done it in the presence of others. The next day she was put to work in the fields and given nothing but water and a little bread, that the gnawing of her stomach might be a gnawing in her conscience. That night she closed her eyes in her narrow bunk and listened to the growling in her belly. It was unhappy. But the Vox Domini was pleased.

The day after, more people came, and she was disobedient again, and again she was punished. It no longer mattered to her. Her Sisters followed a rule, but it wasn't her rule any longer.  


* * *

  
"Fire on your exhale." Mike touches her shoulder, looking along her sightline and steadying her arm. "Breathe out slow and fire while you're doing it. Anything else and you'll be shaky." Florence exhales and fires, and the empty bottle on the fencepost a hundred yards away explodes into a glittering shower of glass. Pieces of it catch the sun and sparkle on the way down and she finds herself smiling. Pretty. Shooting a human being won't be so pretty. She's done it before now, but it had been clumsy and untrained, and her hands had been shaking. They won't shake anymore. Once, she had killed the chickens with one swing of the big knife, and no part of her had trembled as their blood spilled over her hands. She can do this, not for any love of killing, but because it has to be done, and because she can still hear the screams of the man in the alleyway in Harrisburg, holding his gut with blood spilling out between his fingers before she finished the job with another shot to his head. She's never going to do that again.

She's going to do it clean. One swing. No trembling.  


* * *

  
After a few weeks the people stopped coming. Fewer and fewer and finally no more, and the shining trail of cars on the road lessened to only a few, and then only one on occasion, and then none at all, but for those abandoned and pushed to the side by those who came after. Florence stood at the window and watched for them, but there were no more to see, and with the cessation of their coming was the cessation of her disobedience. She had nothing to be disobedient for. It was like it had been in the days before the light in the sky, except that when darkness fell and Florence looked out across the valley, she saw no lights from any house. The world of the Sisters had not changed. But the world itself had. Florence looked out into the completion of that darkness and she wondered, but the Vox Domini was silent. It was silent for the next three years.

It was evening when Florence was coming in from the field, one of the very last, and she met the man. The man was bent over his car, a big car, not like any car she had ever seen before. He hadn't seen her yet, hadn't heard her at all. He was bent over with the hood open, muttering things to himself. She knew that they were words—she always understood words, though no one had ever spoken to her before. She did not know that the man was cursing. Those words had no meaning for her. But she could tell that he was angry, and she stood back a ways, gripping her hoe by the handle and waiting to see what he would do. He was dressed in olive-colored clothing, and she could see that he had a red cap on. He was a big man. She wasn't afraid, not exactly.

She didn't make a noise but maybe the man knew she was there some other way, or maybe it was just bad luck, because he straightened up and turned, and stared at her. His hands were covered with grease, and there was a smudge of grease on his face. He looked very confused. Then he smiled at her and took a step towards her.

"Hey, there." He reached out a hand, and Florence thought of the stray dog she had found once, the way it had growled at her, the way it had bitten her hand when she had reached out to it exactly like that. "Hey. Whatcha doin' there?"

Florence stood her ground and she held onto her hoe, the end of it caked with good rich soil. She had been hoeing the carrot patch. Soon they would plant the carrots and the peas, and then there would be beef stew with carrots. Soon. Right now she had to figure out what to do about the man, and the man was getting closer.

"You're one of those women, aren't you?" The man's hand was held out to her, but his other was on the knife at his side. At his hip was a gun. Florence wasn't sure how she knew what it was, but the knowledge was there, and far down inside her the Vox Domini was whispering a warning. "We've been looking for you. We really want to meet you. Can you take me to the others?"

Florence shook her head, once. No. "C'mon," said the man, and he smiled in a way that stretched his lips over his teeth. He had very white teeth. "You be nice to me and I'll be nice to you." He made a lunge for her. She took a step back, graceful, easy, and she swung her hoe and it buried itself in the man's neck, clots of dirt and then a great deal of blood. The man screamed and tottered back, clutching at the wound in his neck, staring at her with eyes that were as stunned as they were angry.

"You _bitch._ You little--" And he made a move for the gun at his hip. Florence swung the hoe again, into his face. He fell down with a muffled scream, and more blood spattered onto the dirt. Florence swung the hoe down, onto his neck. She did it again. She did it for a moment or two, until she didn't need to do it anymore. This wasn't like the chickens.

When the man was gone, she dropped down into the grass. There was blood on her hands and face and on her white shift. She stared at it and then, silently, she started to cry.

When she walked back up to the house the Sisters looked at her and then left her alone to wash herself. She got into bed and stared out at the darkening sky. The Mother came and sat with her, took her hand and held it. There was still blood under her fingernails.

No one had to tell her, the next morning. No one had to tell her anything. No one ever had. She packed a small bag with dried meat and fruit and vegetables and she walked down the gravel road. As she walked away she could feel their eyes on her. No one had seen her take a long knife from the kitchen. If she thought about the knife for too long she would start to cry again, so she didn't think about it at all. She listened for the Vox Domini, but it was silent.  


* * *

  
She listens for the Vox Domini, in the darkness, in the glow of the coals as Mike sleeps beside her. She loves him. She thinks she has loved him since she saw him, in the way she loves everyone she sees, but now she knows him and so the love is of a different kind. She reaches out and strokes cool fingertips across his brow, and he makes a quiet noise but he doesn't wake. He is teaching her things, but really he is only helping her to understand them better. There isn't any of it that she didn't already know.

_Am I doing the right thing?_ she thinks, because after so long a time around speech she's begun to think in words, even if she never speaks them. She doesn't know who she's asking. She listens for the Vox Domini, but it will not speak to her now. She doesn't think she's being punished. She still has her hands. And she was set on this path a long time ago. The maker of the way. It made her way, and it may make her way with blood, but that doesn't absolve her of the responsibility of walking it.

_Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God._ She remembers the commandment from the Mother's great Book. There may be more than one way to do those things.

She listens for the Vox Domini and it's silent. But in the silence, she can feel that it's pleased.


End file.
